Love
by Karyl McLeod
Summary: Is it a real date or a not-date date? That is Penelope's question.


Thanks for all the lovely comments! There will be more Hotch/Garcia to come. This is the sequel to "Her Still Point".

_**Love**_

"Nervous about the big night?" J.J.'s voice came across the line without so much as a "good morning".

"What's to be nervous about?" Garcia said. "I've got the whole thing figured out. All it is, is a covert counseling session. It's just therapy. Nothing more."

"How do you come by that idea?" the other woman asked dubiously.

"Okay, first Rossi mentions to Hotch that he should talk to me on a counseling level and Hotch decided a Beatles evening would be a nice way to break the ice. Right? It's a simple coincidence that he asked me out on a date. It's not a hot date. It's just a non-date date."

"Wouldn't the simpler explanation be that Rossi told Hotch you've developed feelings for him and he decided to ask you out?"

"Simpler maybe but not as likely, given the circumstances. It all lines up. I counsel murder victim families, right? Hotch and Jack lost Haley almost a year ago. Hotch opened up to Rossi. Rossi thought he needed someone to talk to. Hotch confabbing with a shrink would get his badge flagged for a psych eval. Talking to one profiler over another would wonk-out the whole happy huddle effect. You have your hands full with my brilliant and adorable godson. And my parents were just like murder victims -- the drunk driver killed them with his car. So Rossi uses my whole Hotch thing to move us together so Hotch can get some counseling. It's the perfect explanation. That's all it's for."

"Or maybe you are hip deep in denial because you can't face the fact you're going on a date with Hotch tonight," J.J. said. "A hot date. Not a non-date date."

"You just think that because you're one of the cool kids and you still believe in that whole love thing," she said.

"What whole _love thing_?" J.J. asked with a chuckle.

"You know, girl and boy go out on a date, girl and boy fall in love, boy kisses girl on the doorstep, then they make adorable babies and live happily ever after with a white picket fence. Moon, June, spoon and all that stuff."

"And you don't?"

"Not so much. no. At least not with your charming certainty, my dear," she said, finally throwing the last of her gear into her purse. "Gotta run, toots. Advanced stage routines wait for no man … or woman. Love you madly."

And Garcia clung to her own charming certainty about the non-date date even while Hotch and she sat together during the performance. Even as colorful light splashed over them in time with a staccato throb of music, and while one performer ascending overhead too perilously close made her flinch -- and all the way until Hotch's fingers sunk protectively into the spaces between her own fingers. As phantasmagoric as the whole experience had been, the most surreal part of all had been how incredibly perfect their hands fit together. That one touch made her believe for a moment in the hot date date theory.

But she had talked herself back into doubt again as they made their way out of the audiovisual panoply of psychedelic Beatles and across the open mall.

"Holy paradigm shift," she said, as they walked along. "I mean, how much acid did those guys drop in the 60s?"

He smiled a little. "More than trace amounts, I'd say. Did you enjoy it?"

"Enjoy it? It's been the crème de la crème brûlée of evenings, you courtly thing you," she said, smiling around at the gently lit walkway lined with fairy lights. A leaf-wound archway overhead added a magic kind of luster to the scene. "Even the theater complex is to die for. You go someplace like this and it almost makes the world look like a quasi-phenomenal place."

"I used to love coming here," he said gently, squinting as if to recall. "The first time with Haley. We saw Camelot. 1981 touring company. Richard Harris had just replaced Richard Burton."

Penelope's eyes flashed brightly. "Harris' Arthur was the mondo! I mean, geeks grok the whole King Arthur mythos anyway. The fantasy and science fiction thing, I guess."

"So I'd gathered from reading about computer games," he said, a smile flashing across his lips. "Anyway, I should resist the temptation to become one of those middle-aged men talking about their ex-wives on a first date with a lovely lady."

Garcia blushed a little but smiled at him knowingly. "C'mon, you know I counsel people all the time. I mean, let's be honest. That's what I'm here for, right?"

Hotch paused a moment, staring up at the night, as if trying to remember again. His dark eyes reflected some of the more distant stars. "_Less than a drop in the great blue motion of the sunlit sea. But it seems that some of the drops sparkle_."

She brightened her smile. "That's from Camelot! Arthur's scene with Pelly," she said then was stunned beyond words when Hotch reached for her hand again.

He looked at her palm between his fingers then wrapped them around her hand. "Some of the drops _do _sparkle, Penelope. That is what you're here for. To remind the world of that."

She was so surprised by the light in his eyes, she took a step back. The rapid blush in her face burned softly in the cool night air as she looked away in an awkward moment. She didn't want to take the chance that her eyes might be totally breaking confidence with her heart.

"Thank you … That's incredibly kind." She pretended to push her glasses to her eyes to covertly whisk away an escaped tear. "You know, I'm pretty sure I'll remember this night for a long time."

"Don't make it sound like it's over," he said, pointing toward the building the doorway of which they had just paused before. "This is _Pared del Agua_."

She gaped big and wide. "You're joking. I've so been wanting to go there like forever. It's so cool, they cook you the house specialty, the default mode of which is delicious, and you don't have to even look at a menu. I hear it takes an eon to even get on a waiting list."

"Not if your brother knows the owner."

She grinned as broadly as her face allowed. "Aren't you just full of surprises?"

"Ms. Garcia, you have no idea," he said, lifting a teasing eyebrow and reaching for the restaurant's door.

As they entered the narrow lobby, they were met by a 30-foot iridescent blue water wall that spanned both levels of the restaurant. The levels were connected by a floating staircase of orange and red terrazzo steps.

All of it seemed to on the inside of her glasses. "I can see I'm going to be using the word _amazing _a lot tonight," she said.

They were led by the headwaiter underneath the miniature waterfall where the wall dripped over the last flight of terrazzo steps. They were taken to a corner table, by a hearth, with an eagle's nest view of the theater pavilion. The beauty of the scene below them led her to the edge of sadness and sort of left her there, waiting.

"We'll be with you momentarily," the seating waiter said, as he bowed and walked away.

"You eat what they put before you," Hotch observed. "Sounds like dinner at Mom's."

"If Mom was a five-star chef, I guess," she said.

Hotch's stare softened quickly with remorse. "I'm sorry, that was an insensitive thing I just said … about mothers."

She shook her head. "No, it wasn't. We both lost parents young. You even lost your dad a couple of years earlier than I lost mine."

He nodded. "True, I was 16 but at least I still had my mother. You lost both of them at the same time."

She propped up an unsteady smile. "So we both know losing family hurts bad. And we know that one of the worst things is that everyone is afraid to talk to you about how badly it hurts. It's like you're marooned all alone on your own personal island of grief. So I want you to feel like you can talk to me whenever, whatever, however, okay?"

He smiled gently. "You're a jewel. But the actual fact is that I keep telling _myself _I should be moving past it. It's been almost a year since Haley died. But then I think of all the things I could have done … I might have thought to do instead. Something else I might have … tried that would … change the ending."

She smiled sadly at his careful inroad toward Penelope's own "obvious reason for the date," namely talking about "it." "You never get past it," she said carefully, looking up into his eyes. "You only learn to live with it. Most days, it doesn't bother me a lot. Sometimes it does. It's only really bad at night."

"I've noticed that. When I try to sleep, I keep remembering …" He shook his head hard, closing his eyes. " … Voices. Other … sounds …"

She reached over to shyly touch the fist he had just subtly clenched around the table's edge. "If it makes you feel any less alone, Aaron, I hear those sounds, too. Not like you do, of course, but I do hear them. They'll fade in time but they won't go away. You just learn to screen them out. I mean, it's been years for me and I still dream about the crash some nights. Squealing brakes, burning rubber … seeing the truck before we collided."

He leaned forward as if trying to see her more clearly in the soft light. "My god, Penelope … were you in the car when your parents were killed?"

She nodded. "Mom and Dad were driving me to Cal Tech freshman intake. They were hippies, right? They always hated laws about seatbelts so I was the only one wearing one."

"And they were killed instantly?"

"There isn't a lot left when a little hippie bug collides with a semi," she said, shrugging. "They were killed. I had a broken collar bone and bruised knees. Lucky me, huh? But for a long time I wished I hadn't been so lucky."

"And you were left to raise your brothers alone?"

"I tried. I went to college, I worked, I played Mama Lion but my first hitch in the army of responsible adults was made of nothing but fail."

He nodded in understanding. "I tried to be the man of the house and wasn't very good at it either. So what happened?"

She frowned a little. "My brothers moved to Vermont with our aunt. I quit Cal Tech. And I ran away and joined the underground hacker circus. Basically, I chickened out. All that led me to my life of high crimes and misdemeanors when the Feds busted me and here I am."

Hotch smiled knowingly, shaking his head. "I've read your file, Penelope. You hacked into the Quantico intranet sub floor and left the head programmer an ASCII drawing of Marvin the Martian just to let him know you had been in. You were one of the top three hackers in the world. You could have done much worse."

She grinned. "My dear adorable dark-haired one, I was one of the two top hackers in the world. And they basically said they'd rather have me working with them than against them."

"I can see why. I read your profile."

She almost dropped back in her seat. "Wait. Profile? You mean a profiler profile? Like one exists … of me? Seriously?"

He nodded. "We're all profiled before we're brought in. The whole team was. Me, included."

"I'm almost afraid to ask. I mean, can I ask? What it said?"

He reached for his graduated blackberry. After three clicks, he seemed to be squinting at the screen. "I don't have the profiles for the team with me but I do have the general survey personality type overviews. Basically they're just bits of generalized observations spit out in jagged sentences. If you're interested in that."

She shrugged weakly. "Should I grit my teeth?"

He leaned forward a little, to speak slowly and carefully. "Personality perspective destiny Morgani type 90v. Such subjects see themselves as victims of fate. Many subjects feel called upon by unknown forces to fulfill a special destiny. The mission both traps and compels them. Subject would prefer to remain a mystery to everyone around them due to a considerable level of self-doubt. The belief in destiny in such subjects is believed to stem from a subconscious feeling of abandonment by a parent or parents that requires the forgiveness of fate. The abandonment is often thought to result from a rejection by the parent of the subject for reasons of unworthiness. Subjects fear looking inside for truth so they seek it in cosmic signs, civil rules and authority structures in society. Running from their own demons, they often try to save the world. This drive rules their lives. In the case of the subject in question, it would even explain the choice of eyewear."

She swallowed hard. She reached for a glass of water and drank from it awhile but really wished there was a convenient hole that she could crawl into. "Wow. Just wow. I guess it's pointless to deny to a profiler that they got a ton of stuff right."

"Actually," Hotch said, switching off the blackberry, "I was reading from my own personality perspective."

She really sat far back that time. "You're joking."

"Not in the least." He laughed a little. "Want to hear their explanation for my shades?"

"Gee, I just thought you wore them because you didn't like sun in your eyes."

"That's the immediate reason of course," Hotch said. "But the view is I have very honest, expressive eyes. They broadcast my feelings. The glasses give me an edge of detachment, according to this interpretation. They're a kind of mask, I guess."

"Is that what they think about my glasses, too?"

He looked at her honestly, directly. "No. You wear your glasses to help hide your beauty so that men will take you more seriously."

She hoped she wasn't blushing as deeply as the warmth of her face suggested. She had to force herself to look his way again.

"Thank you. What an incredibly nice thing to say." She lifted her glass of water again, considering another drink to steady herself. "Personally, I prefer to think of our eyewear as part of our superhero ensemble. Why don't we drink to our secret identities?"

He clinked his glass against hers. "And the feelings they so often hide."

At that moment, she was grateful as hell that their dinner arrived.

***

"And here we are," she said softly and sadly, looking back toward her door. "Thanks for an amazing evening, Hotch. I couldn't mean that more. This has been a night I'll always remember and I really try to not remember them usually."

He smiled. "I hope we'll be doing this again."

"I hope so, too," she said, reaching into her purse and withdrawing a card. She handed it to Hotch. "Okay, so we have Surviving Survival meetings for families every week in my building, right? My homie in the next building over is part of the group so she lets us use their rec room for meetings. I really think it might help. And it would be really super if you could come. I mean, I'd really like that. Just so you know."

His smile broadened as he considered the card for a long moment. He slipped the card into his pocket with the shades. "Thank you, Penelope. I'll think about it. All that said, I guess there's only one thing left to do."

She smiled and nodded. "For us to say good night," she said and offered him her hand to shake.

"I was actually thinking of something more like this," he said, leaning suddenly forward to brush his lips against her own.

She found herself leaning forward too and before she knew it, they were really kissing. Like _really _kissing. Like grabbing-at-hair and breathing-hard kissing. No mistake to its meaning. No ambiguity at all. He kissed her until she was really pretty damned sure her shoes were going to melt or at least catch fire.

When he came up for air, he gazed with very serious intent down through her glasses. "Understood?"

She nodded numbly. "Yeah."

"See you tomorrow. Now go inside so I'll know your safe."

She nodded more numbly. "Tomorrow."

Somehow, and she wasn't really sure how, she stumbled in a state of amazement into her apartment. She locked the door by instinct. She turned around and then tried to figure out what the hell had just happened. Well, actually Garcia knew perfectly well what had just happened. She was trying to figure out a way that it hadn't just happened so she wouldn't be frickin' scared to death.

The phone was ringing. She picked it up, also by instinct.

"Okay," J.J. said instantly from her end. "I know this is adolescent at best but I couldn't call you on your cell phone for … obvious reasons. I mean, you could have been doing something … somewhere … anyway. I was trying to restrain myself till tomorrow but I lost the fight and -- "

"It was a date," Garcia whispered in a stunned voice to J.J. "A. Real. Date."

"Wow."

"Tell me about it."

"So how does that make you feel?"

Garcia shook her head to clear her thoughts. She surrendered to the arms of her favorite chair. "Well, you know that whole love thing we were talking about earlier?"

"Moon, June, spoon, etcetera? What about it?"

"Well, I think maybe I'm believing in it now."


End file.
